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Cassandra Community Edition: v2.1.5

Overview

DataStax Community Edition is a free packaged distribution of Apache Cassandra made available by DataStax. The ideal database foundation for today’s modern applications.

Apache Cassandra, a top level Apache project born at Facebook and built on Amazon’s Dynamo and Google’s BigTable, is a distributed storage system for managing very large amounts of structured data spread out across many commodity servers, while providing highly available service with no single point of failure. Cassandra aims to run on top of an infrastructure of hundreds of nodes (possibly spread across different data centers in multiple geographic areas). At this scale, small and large components fail continuously. The way Cassandra manages a persistent state in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems relying on this service.

While in many ways Cassandra resembles a database and shares many design and implementation strategies of familiar database environments, Cassandra does not support a full relational data model; instead, it provides clients with a simple data model that supports dynamic control over data layout and format. The Cassandra system was designed to run on cheap commodity hardware and handle high write throughput while not sacrificing read efficiency, helping drive down costs of ownership while greatly increasing the value of a business’s big data environment.

These aims have been widely met and the benefits of Cassandra are being realized across the industry spectrum. Many companies have successfully deployed and benefited from Apache Cassandra including some large companies such as: Adobe, Comcast, eBay, Rackspace, Netflix, Twitter, and Cisco. The larger production environments have hundreds of TB of data in clusters of over 300 servers. Cassandra is available under the latest Apache license.